James Cameron puts us aboard the ship and brings off his splashy movie with high-tech bravura

By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 12/19/97

If all 1,500 victims of the Titanic had been saved in 1912, their collective cheers wouldn't have begun to drown out Hollywood's collective sigh of relief that James Cameron has avoided the liner's fate, grandly launching ``Titanic'' after $200 million and the worst buzz since ``Waterworld.'' It's a big, splashy movie about a disaster that does not itself turn into a disaster. It floats triumphantly, supplying the rationale Hollywood craves for its own perpetually titanic profligacy. It's the kind of movie Hollywood believes in, has bonded its soul to, wants to see validated, needs to believe can blow the competition out of the water. ``Titanic'' is big-budget spectacle and director Cameron brings it off with high-tech bravura, placing us aboard the ship in real time. The Titanic actually took two hours to sink. The film runs more than three. But never mind. Part of impact of ``Titanic'' comes from its sheer overdoneness.

It's also smart enough to want to engage our emotions with a love story between attractive young stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Cameron, who also wrote the film, has never been one to dig deeply into romantic or any other feelings, and he doesn't do so here. But if the romance is hokey, it keeps the film from being solely about the technical side of rendering the legendary disaster. While clearly fabricated, the disaster is also impressive -- and shrewdly set up. You don't have to do research to see ``Titanic'' because Cameron packages everything we need to know, neatly and efficiently, by framing the disaster with a present-day search expedition whose good-natured leader, Bill Paxton, lays out what happened with a computer graphic display on his salvage craft.

The Titanic, traveling too fast with rudder and propellers too small to allow it to corner well, and carrying only half the lifeboats it should have, grazed an iceberg, ripping its hull open below the water line. Inexorably, the water level climbed the five socially stratified decks until the ship snapped in two, the front half nose-diving to the ocean bottom, the back half following, as a desperate effort was made to fill the lifeboats with women and children (although first-class passengers were seated first, to the strings of a string quartet -- if anyone could hear it playing).

The undersea probing of the eerie sunken hulk by modern-day robot subs, and the face of the 101-year-old survivor aboard the salvage ship (a beatific and just-mysterious-enough Gloria Stuart, representing Winslet at age 101, harboring her own secrets), turn the film into a ghost story. Cameron ratchets up the intensity when the ship starts going down and the people aboard it exhibit the predictable range of responses, from noble to base, with lots of panic and stoicism in between. Water rushes into the ship's spaces, filling them, while people scurry. The film reaches a beautifully spooky apotheosis when the survivors bob in the frozen water, hoping lifeboats will double back and pluck them from the water before it sucks the last heat and breath from them. Here, finally, the love story finally flickers to doomed, poignant life.

This last chapter is the film's most moving. Until then, what Cameron has given us is a representation of a love story rather than the heat and primal chemistry of the love story itself. This, I think, has to do more with Cameron being able to spread himself only so thin as writer and director. The passion between DiCaprio and Winslet isn't often felt -- although the impulses that each character harbors are. DiCaprio has his best role since ``Gilbert Grape'' as an exuberant, happy-go-lucky artist, whose independent ways are just what Winslet's pale Philadelphia society girl -- feeling lassoed as she glides home to a big loveless marriage to the nasty son of a Pittsburgh steel tycoon -- craves.

She aches to break loose from a suffocating push into an entombing life by her desperate but impeccably credentialed mother, played by Frances Fisher, whose subtly masked desperation is one of the acting highlights. Billy Zane's sneering, supercilious tycoon is played as the role is written -- badly, and as caricature. Kathy Bates is a plus as the Colorado silver king's wife who was to become known as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, who's on the side of the upstart kid. If Winslet is convincing as a spirit yearning to break free, DiCaprio is easily her match as the jaunty artist who senses that the way to win her is to sneak her into steerage and encourage her to dance there, teach her how to spit, and sketch her in the nude. They're more convincing as embodiments of hunger for life, without ever quite generating the heat we want to feel in their mutual attraction.

They're there so Cameron can humanize what would otherwise be a documentary about a colossal blunder that still stands as the metaphorical disaster of the century, a monument to arrogance and stupidity, and a forerunner of the death of the Victorian world, both overstuffed and cruel, made final a few years later by World War I. Cameron doesn't quite weave the challenging elements of his film into the kind of big pop myth that would have achieved a certain poetry. It's cornball enough, but lacks the emotional conviction only Cameron could have supplied. Still, its ambitions in the direction of large, archetypal feelings set ``Titanic'' apart from all but a few other disaster movies. Sillier movies have won Oscars, and its technical and visual size and impact will get to a lot of people. ``Titanic'' is the best disaster movie money can buy.